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Brideshead Revisted

Revisiting and revisiting

First, the complaints came from the blog mavens and malcontents, and then from the mainline reviewers: The new motion picture version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was ineptly, insultingly unfaithful to its source.

The protesters have had a prominent example of superior inter-media conversion for comparison, the 11-part 1981 British television adaptation of the novel. (PBS showed it in the States the next year). This comparison/contrast would be at least a little unfair no matter what the merits of the new one. It has about 120 minutes to accommodate the 1945 novel. The television production took around 660 minutes and had an 11-month shooting schedule. It was conceived as a richly authentic transferal of the book and it stands as one of the most successful such efforts ever undertaken. It excels not just in its accuracy, but also in skillful recreation of written language in cinematic terms, even as it employes a great amount of that language in narration and dialogue.

Julian Jarrold’s new movie isn’t going to evoke the kind of admiration the television series still does, and not only because of the stubbornness of the latter’s adherents. Nor does it in any way merit it. It seems uncertainly suspended between respect for Waugh’s accomplishment and a concern to re-illuminate and interpret it for contemporary audiences. In pursuit of this reinterpretation the filmmakers have made some disabling errors in judgment.

Waugh’s novel is about the encounter between Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), an artistic but unworldly upper-middle-class youth, and Sebastian Flyte (Ben Wishaw), the dandyish, fey, enticingly eccentric but doomed young aristocrat, at Oxford in the early 1920s. It tracks the life-altering, sometimes tragic consequences of their meeting through two decades.

Charles and Sebastian begin a romantic friendship, and when the young lord impulsively takes Charles for a quick visit to Brideshead, his Anglo-Catholic family’s country seat and grand estate, the effect is transformative. Charles is entranced and, in a sense, loses his heart to the place. Through the novel, he is intimately involved with both Sebastian and his sister Julia (Hayley Atwell), but his deepest feelings may be for Brideshead and all that it epitomizes of rarified excellence. It remains for him a glorious symbol and refutation of life’s insults and injuries, a citadel removed from the 20th century’s broad, flattening cultural and social forces. Charles is a semi-autobiographical surrogate for the self-consciously, sometimes defiantly snobbish and conservative Waugh, although Charles is never the theatrical reprobate his creator became.

There is a strong element of nostalgic yearning and rue in the novel that the television series at least imperfectly caught, but to which this movie seems oblivious. The sense of inter-war, intergenerational conflict, the unstable combination of privileged gaiety and despair that Waugh wrote of is missing in action.

What Jarrold and screenwriters Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock have substituted is a sense of personal guilt on Charles’ part and an ethical clash between the strict demands of the Catholic faith and Charles’ unbelief, on the one hand, and Sebastian’s inability to conform, on the other. This convenient guilt is alien to Waugh’s Charles and, while the struggle of conscience and character is certainly important in the novel, its treatment here is much more blunt-edged and simplistic. The defender of the faith in both the novel and the movie is Sebastian’s mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), but Thompson and Jarrold’s character isn’t the charmingly insinuating but quietly resolute matriarchal enforcer that Waugh, and the first adaptation, made her. She’s now a slightly arch, severe figure, and Charles’ initial susceptibility to her manipulation is less understandable.

Most of the other performances are either without much impact, or, as in the case of Wishaw’s Sebastian, a little off. The actor is obviously skilled, but he comes across as a vaguely epicene Puck, rather than the seductively camp but haunted youth Waugh intended.

On its own, limited terms, this Brideshead isn’t painfully bad, but it’s rather pointless and enervated. Screen adaptations needn’t, in principle, ape their source material, but they need some vital force of their own. This movie has none.


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